Episode 14: Sarah Whitehead, The Bank Nun

Episode

13 May

A black-and-white illustration of Sarah Whitehead. She's dressed in all-black, including black gloves and a high collared dress and a hooded cloak. Her hair is curly. She looks sad. She is standing in front of a large white building and an iron fence — *Sarah Whitehead, ‘The Bank Nun Ghost’*
Reproduction of a 19th-century print from *The New Wonderful Magazine*

Welcome back to Paranormal Pajama Party!

I couldn’t be more thrilled to kick off the second season tonight, and I’m beyond excited to dive into another season of chilling tales and thought-provoking discussions with you.

Our first party guest of the season is the ghost of Sarah Whitehead, also known as the Bank Nun. Her mysterious figure has been spotted haunting the Bank of England, Threadneedle Street, and the London Underground station nearby since the mid-19th century, dressed in mourning black and searching endlessly for her lost brother.

Steph: Before we begin, a quick content warning: Paranormal Pajama Party is a podcast about scary stories and legends, but there’s nothing scarier than the patriarchy.
When discussing tales in which women are often the villains, we’ll have to unpack some stories in which women are the victims.
This episode contains the usual amount of cursing, as well as mental illness, classism and the death penalty.
Tonight’s episode features a frighteningly pale woman asking for the same thing over and over again. Sound familiar? If you’re enjoying the show, won’t you please consider leaving a five-star rating and review on your favourite podcast app? Thanks!
London had turned cool as night fell, and Emily pulled her coat tighter around herself as she descended the steps into the London Underground. She’d hit so many tourist hotspots that day that they were starting to blur together, and she was ready to sink into her hotel room bed for some well-earned shuteye.
Without the usual hustle and bustle of commuters at this late hour, the silence of Bank Station was a welcome change from the busy streets she’d just left.
Fluorescent lights bounced off the station’s white tiled walls, and the sound of the steep bank of escalators sinking to the tracks below seemed amplified in the quiet surroundings. Emily felt another chill as she stepped onto the empty platform and wished she’d remembered her scarf.
A sudden surge of anxiety gripped her. It wasn’t the first time she’d gotten turned around on the Underground. Had she misread the map again? She looked around for signage, but all of the digital screens were black. What the hell?
But then something moved at the far end of the platform. Another passenger! The other woman’s black dress blended into the deep shadows around the curve of the track, so she hadn’t spotted her at first.
She was glad the other passenger was a woman – she hadn’t been eager to let a man know she was travelling alone and perhaps a bit lost. She fixed a big American smile on her face and walked down the track towards the other woman, hoping she was a local and would know when the next train was arriving.
As she approached, she noticed that the tall woman was dressed in an odd, old-fashioned way. A cosplayer, maybe? Emily thought. And a good one, too – even from a distance, she could tell that the woman’s long dress, which shrouded her from chin to ankle, wasn’t some cheapo Halloween costume. She wore a black hat and curls that framed her pale face in a way that made Emily think of Jane Austen movies. Maybe she was a tour guide at one of the landmarks or something.
“Excuse me?” Emily asked gently, her voice sounding oddly loud in the silence of the station.
The woman turned to face her, revealing a long face with the saddest eyes Emily had ever seen. The smile dropped from her lips and a wave of melancholy swept over her – she could’ve started crying right then and there.
Caught off guard and wrestling with her emotions, she hesitated. The woman spoke first:
“Have you seen my brother?” she asked, her voice filled with a haunting mix of hope and despair.
Emily stared at her. “I… I’m sorry, I haven’t seen him,” she replied. It was all she could do to get the words out around the lump in her throat. Her stomach felt like it had dropped into her feet.
A rushing sound behind her startled Emily into glancing over her shoulder.
[Distant train noise]
With great relief, she saw the headlights of an oncoming train illuminating the tunnel. She turned back to the woman in black to apologise for bothering her, or to offer her a final word of comfort – something for the poor creature with the sad eyes and the missing brother.
But Emily was alone on the platform. The woman was gone.
[MUSIC]
Steph: Hi! I’m Steph, and this is Paranormal Pajama Party, the podcast that brings you classic ghost stories and legends featuring female phantoms and femme fatales. Together, we’ll brush the cobwebs off these terrifying tales to shed some light on their origins and learn what they can tell us about the deep-rooted fears society projects onto women.
Welcome back to season 2 of the podcast! Ooo – love your new jammies!
I’m back with a boatload of brand-new scary stories and myths – it’s going to be an exciting season. Thank you so much for your patience while I was away researching and writing new episodes. You’re the best. For real.
Tonight’s pyjama party guest will make you question everything Bridgerton taught you to believe (except for, like, love. Please continue to believe in love). Regency-era London was not a series of high-stakes debuts and balls for the parts of the population too poor to run around with the society types, and women were subject to so many restrictions that it’s almost unbelievable to our modern Sense and Sensibility.
Yeah, there will be some Jane Austen references in this episode. I have no regrets.
Sarah Whitehead, also known as the Bank Nun, was not a nun at all. She was either a mentally ill woman whose grasp on reality was destroyed by the execution of her brother by the British government, a cunning grifter intent on separating the wealthy men of London from a few bucks, or a desperate woman with a plan. I’ll let you decide which one she really was.
The short version of her story goes like this: Sarah’s brother Paul, once a clerk at the esteemed Bank of England, was executed for forgery. Kept unaware of the situation by well-meaning friends, Sarah discovered the truth after coming to the bank one day and enquiring about her brother. When a staff member told her what had happened, she broke.
Unable to cope with reality, she reappeared every day afterwards, wearing unflattering lipstick and black mourning clothes that made her look a bit like a nun, asking customers and employees alike if they’d seen her brother. The men would often take pity on her and give her a few coins from their pockets. Eventually, she became such a nuisance that the Bank directors themselves offered her a financial grant to go away.
And she did. She kept this promise… in life.
In death, Sarah Whitehead’s ghost still stalks the Bank of England, Threadneedle Street, and the nearby London Underground station, dressed in black and asking strangers if they’ve seen her brother. Then she departs, leaving an air of utter sadness and despair in her wake.
That’s the version of the story you’ll hear on ghost tours. You’ll never believe this, but I think there’s more to her tale than that. Let’s start at the beginning.
Because this is history, Sarah’s story begins, of course, with a man. One of my sources – and many of them are unreliable, but we’ll get into why that is later – says her father held some kind of important position in the post office, which enabled him to provide his children – Sarah, and her older brother, Paul – with an education and save up some money besides. The family was decidedly middle class.
Education in Regency England meant different things for girls and boys. If they were well-off, boys were meant to inherit their family estates. If they weren’t as well to do, they were educated so that they could enter into respectable professions, which would have been Paul’s situation.
Girls, on the other hand, were trained in “female skills” – that is, given enough of an understanding of humanities and sciences that they could be good conversationalists, but not so much that they would question their future husbands’ opinions in these areas.
They also had lessons in household management, and an emphasis was placed on their abilities in music and art. It was a limited education, but that was a non-issue because they’d live at home until a respectable man married them before they became too old and decrepit – around age 30. They didn’t need to learn anything about money, because their male relatives controlled it for them. I defy you to find a flaw in this perfect system.
In 1797, Paul obtained a position as a clerk at the Bank of England, which was nicknamed the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street – old lady as in, old maid. This was a respectable job, and Paul was very good at it. Due to the nature of his work, he rubbed elbows with quite a few wealthy people. And apparently, thanks to his gentlemanly upbringing, they thought he was a swell guy and started inviting him to parties and activities with them.
But rich people have champagne tastes, and Paul began to feel pressure to live beyond his means. Upon the death of their parents, Sarah – still single – moved into his slightly-too-nice home to become his housekeeper.
A single woman’s situation in Regency England changed dramatically after the death of her parents. In some cases, their parents may have kept them at home and away from suitors on purpose, to ensure a sort of stay-at-home caretaker for them in their old age.
Even if women were from well-to-do families, they often faced a life of poverty if they never married. In 1817, Jane Austen wrote to her niece, “Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor – which is one very strong argument in favour of matrimony.”
Jane herself never married and, after her father’s death, suffered from poverty and a lack of freedom, hoping for handouts and help from her brothers.
By the way, Jane’s name never appeared on any of her books during her lifetime because reputation was everything in Regency England, and being a female author was not respectable or modest. According to one of my sources, a contemporary female writer named Mary Brunton, imagining her name being revealed to the public, wrote, “To be pointed at – to be noticed and commented upon – to be suspected of literary airs – to be shunned, as literary women are, by the more unpretending of my own sex; and abhorred, as literary women are, by the more pretending of the other! I would sooner exhibit as a rope dancer.”
So that job’s out, too, although I suppose rope dancer is always an option.
Unless they married, women’s financial safety depended entirely on their fathers or male relatives. There was a welfare system at the time, but single women were paid a maximum of two shillings a week, which works out to about $27 here in Australia today, or $17.25 US. Can you pay your rent, feed yourself and afford utilities on less than $27 a week?
According to one of my sources, a book titled Women Alone: Spinsters in England, 1660-1850 by feminist historian Bridget Hill, when an unmarried woman named Sarah Acland’s brother tried to calm her down after the death of their father, she told him, “You who have a comfortable home and a wife cannot the least realise what it is to lose Father and home and position in a moment.”
Single women were entirely at the mercy of their families. If they were lucky and had an unmarried brother, as Sarah did, they might be allowed to move in and keep his home. But this wasn’t always an option, and sometimes the brothers were married, so the sister was just in the way, or they didn’t even think of it.
Hill also writes that “the novelist Sarah Scott’s brother never even considered asking his sister to live with him – even as a housekeeper – when her mother died and he inherited the estate; she was left homeless.”
If they moved in with a brother, these weren’t always nice men, and they often treated their single sisters with derision as single women were a kind of social pariah, unnaturally alone and unable to provide anything of value to society – at least, on the surface. In reality, they took up a lot of the invisible emotional labour necessary in every household, acting as aunt, nurse and companion.
In Sarah Whitehead’s case, while Paul was out with his friends, overspending and being a fun, sexy bachelor – which was completely socially acceptable – she oversaw everything on the domestic front, organised his servants, and received visitors, which her education qualified her to do very nicely.
Paul, tempted by his friends’ lifestyle, began to speculate on the stock market.
Look, my understanding of the finance part of this is a bit shaky, so I asked Chat GPT to explain it to me using Beanie Babies as examples, and this is what it said:
Let’s say there’s a rare Beanie Baby named “Peanut the Royal Blue Elephant.” Historically, this particular Beanie Baby has been known to fetch high prices among collectors due to its rarity and demand.
Now, imagine a rumour circulating within the Beanie Baby collector community that the manufacturer plans to re-release a limited edition version of “Peanut the Royal Blue Elephant” to commemorate its 25th anniversary. This rumour could drive up demand for the original version among collectors who believe its value will increase even further.
As a speculative investor, you might purchase several “Peanut the Royal Blue Elephant” Beanie Babies at the current market price, anticipating that the rumoured re-release will indeed boost their value. However, this is a risky bet because the rumour might be false, or the market might not react as expected.
If the rumour proves to be true and the value of “Peanut the Royal Blue Elephant” Beanie Babies does indeed increase, you could potentially sell your collection at a profit. On the other hand, if the rumour turns out to be false or the market doesn’t react as anticipated, you could end up losing money on your investment.
Then it warned me not to invest in Beanie Babies. Too late, ChatGPT. I put all my money in Peanut way back in 1998. Luckily, I only had $2 in my piggy bank at the time.
Anyway, speculating on stocks was not ok with Paul’s employer, the Bank of England. Classily, his bosses allowed him to resign, rather than firing him, allowing him to save his Pride… and Prejudice. Nope, that was a stretch.
But now Paul was in a pickle, because when you need money for things, having an income helps. He began to work as a stockbroker, apparently falling in with sketchier and sketchier company. He seemed to have kept all of this from his sister.
At this same time in history, the British government was getting pretty nervous about its longtime enemy, France. After the French Revolution overthrew Marie Antoinette and family, Great Britain expelled the French ambassador. France responded by declaring war. In 1797, the same year Paul started working at the Bank, French forces attempted to invade Wales.
The threat of war resulted in a run on the Bank of England of people trying to convert their paper banknotes to gold. But England had overprinted its banknotes in previous years, and converting all of them to bullion would’ve bankrupted the Bank. So Parliament quickly passed the Bank Restriction Act, removing the requirement for the Bank to convert banknotes into gold.
Since the government was hoarding bullion to pay for war, paper currency was increasing in use, but it wasn’t considered as trustworthy as gold. It makes sense to me – dragons hoard gold because it’s real. Paper money is so… fragile. It was also extremely susceptible to forgery, and criminals were quick to take advantage of this.
In response to a significant uptick in forgery, the British Parliament passed 36 anti-forgery statutes, and most of them carried the death penalty as punishment. According to one of my sources, the Bank pursued these prosecutions – and executions – zealously. Many people condemned at the Old Bailey simply didn’t realise the banknotes they were trying to spend or cash were counterfeit.
All of this financial fuckery made British citizens extremely anxious. It was a hot-button issue, to the point that a British Prime Minister was assassinated by a pro-bullion agitator in 1812.
Meanwhile, things were not going well for Paul.
Quote: “The higher he rose upon the unsubstantial ladder of speculation the more means he required for his extravagances. High company dazzled his imagination, and capricious fortune turning her back upon him, the bubble of his golden dream burst… Want planted a withering finger where luxury had before revelled.”
Bewitched by money, speculating on the stock market and trying to live beyond his means, in 1811, Paul brought a forged banknote into his old place of work, the Bank of England, and convinced a fancy-pants banker to cash it for him. The banker was sceptical, but when he asked one of his employees, the man recognised Paul and said he was a good and trustworthy employee at the Bank. In actuality, Paul had left more than a year before. Reassured, the banker cashed the counterfeit note. Such was the power of Paul’s Persuasion. (That was the last Austen reference, I swear.)
[Laughter]
Steph: But Paul’s forgery was soon found out, and the Bank made an example out of him. Paul was charged with forgery in late 1811, convicted and sentenced to death. His execution was carried out at Newgate Prison in 1812.
Some sources say that Sarah’s friends, not wanting her to learn about her brother’s evil deeds, kept his conviction, imprisonment, and execution from her, maybe even taking her away on the day of his hanging so that she wouldn’t hear the bells ring announcing a death.
I don’t understand how that would be possible, since she kept the man’s house, but it does make for a more dramatic story if she has her mental breakdown in the Bank of England, the very institution that ensured her brother’s death sentence. The story goes that she went in asking for him, and a clerk, not knowing she was Paul’s sister, told her the whole shocking story without a care for her reaction.
Imagine for a moment that you are a single woman in Georgian England. You’re 25, which means your marriage window is closing – something everyone around you has made sure you’re acutely aware of. Your brother, who controls all your money and is the only one standing between you and homelessness, has disappeared. You go to his workplace, only to have some gleeful dickhead tell you that he hasn’t worked there for more than a year, oh, and also, he’s a criminal who’s been executed tra la la.
It hasn’t even occurred to the man telling you this that you might know the crook he’s talking about, and that this news not only means you are now homeless and penniless, but that any better future you could’ve hoped for is probably also dead – you are unable to work for a living, you’re not qualified to do anything anyway, and it’s hard to marry if you’re just scrambling to stay alive. Not only that, your reputation, which, as I mentioned, was everything at this time, is torched.
Wouldn’t that break your brain a little bit? I know it would break mine.
And it seems to have had a similar effect on Sarah. She left the Bank, but returned the next day dressed in full mourning clothes – in black crepe from head-to-toe, reminiscent of a nun – and again asked staff where her brother was, seemingly having forgotten the tragic answer.
She came back the next day with the same question. And the next, and the next, and the next.
Often, employees and businessmen would take pity on her and give her some money to get her to move on.
She visited the Bank and nearby Threadneedle Street every day, asking for Paul, until 1818, when some of the directors, tired of her appearances, paid her to stop coming.
In that time, her notoriety grew. She gained something of a reputation as an unhinged woman in black – with red blush and lipstick – haunting the Bank and asking the same question over and over. Her activities began to be reported on in The Times, and it spread from there.
The story of her and her brother was eventually rewritten as a cautionary tale in a paper called “Streetology of London”, where she was depicted as a con artist who bullied financiers out of their hard-earned money. She was also – gasp! – an unwed mother, further contributing to the blight of poverty by breeding another mouth to feed.
When I first read Sarah’s story, it’s not that I was exactly Team Banker, but I did think she sounded – and I mean this in the nicest way possible – really annoying. Her story is tragic and she was clearly unwell, but… come on. Showing up every single day and asking for your dead brother? It would start to grate a little sometime around day 293.
But after digging into her story and the context a little bit more, now I have another opinion. While I’m sure that the news of her brother’s execution did throw her for a loop, I think Sarah Whitehead is a survivor. And although her behaviour might have been a little annoying for the rich white men she had the audacity to bother, now I think it was pretty clever.
Because what if Sarah Whitehead was in her right mind? And what if she realised that showing up as a pitiable figure worked? She had no options besides the workhouse. Except! To become the thing that these men had both created and found truly horrifying – to appear in their faces and show them what social mores had done to her: reduced her to a mourning beggar. The fact that she put on makeup was remarked upon widely in the judgmental articles about her, and one of my sources points out the connection being drawn between the forged banknote her brother tried to pass off as the real thing, and a disgusting spinster who pretends to still have any kind of sex appeal by wearing makeup.
By the way, there are no contemporary records of anyone named Sarah Whitehead, but this same researcher, Rebecca Nesvet, found evidence of someone named Phoebe Whitehead, who may be a likely candidate for the Bank Nun. Phoebe would have been 25 when Paul was executed. Imagine, being grossed out by a 25-year-old in lipstick because she’s so old. If she showed up at the Bank every day for six years, she was an ancient 31 when she finally stopped.
I don’t know if that’s what Sarah’s plan was. I just think there’s something to it. If you can’t work, and you can’t marry, and you can’t get very much money out of the welfare system… but you can be annoying enough that a board of directors gets together and offers to give you a large enough sum to go away forever… wouldn’t you do it?
Unfortunately, if Sarah was actually Phoebe, the payout didn’t save her from destitution. Phoebe worked as a laundress and was sent to the workhouses three times.
Sarah Whitehead appeared in a number of articles and books about zany characters of London – apparently dying in 1837, according to one, and being buried in a graveyard now owned by the Bank, which might explain why her ghost still haunts the area.
She was briefly mentioned again as “a poor demented woman” by Charles Dickens in 1853, and she appears in a WH Auden poem with other minor historical figures in 1940. She’s consistently portrayed as an eccentric at best, and a total nut at worst.
But she really came into her own in 1847, when a writer named James Malcolm Rymer entered the picture.
In the days of public executions, people would sell large broadsides to the crowd, which usually included a crude illustration of the crime or a portrait of the criminal, a written account of the crime and the trial, including the criminal’s confession and a little morality poem at the end warning people not to make the same mistakes.
If you’re like, “Hang on, that’s just true crime podcasts,” THAT’S WHAT I THOUGHT, TOO! Oh my god. We’ve always loved this stuff!
Fast-forward to the Industrial Revolution, which led to more people with a little more pocket money and a little more literacy. Additionally, printing became much more affordable, and the birth of the railroad meant people were spending more time commuting, and needed something to keep them entertained.
If Apple Podcasts had existed during that time, I’m sure all these little Industrial Revolution working-class boys would’ve been listening to Serial on their commute. But it didn’t, so instead they were buying serialised stories of about 8-16 pages for a penny each. These were penny dreadfuls.
Penny dreadfuls were a cheaper alternative to the popular serialised novels of the day, like Dickens’, which were usually about a shilling per part. If my math is math-ing correctly, today, a penny dreadful would cost about $1.82 Australian or $1.20 US.
James Malcolm Rymer was an early writer of penny dreadfuls, churning out boatloads during his career. He’s credited as the co-creator of Sweeney Todd. You know, the demon barber of Fleet Street. He also helped popularise the vampire genre, so both Stephen Sondheim and Stephenie Meyer owe him big time.
But when Rymer came across the Bank Nun’s story, it must have struck a chord with him. The death sentence had been completely repealed for forgery charges by 1837, but Rymer’s brother was convicted of forgery after that and, much like Sweeney Todd, they transported him for life to Tasmania.
Rymer’s version of Sarah’s story, published as a penny dreadful with the title “The Lady in Black, or, the Widow and the Wife” renames her Marian, as in Maid Marian, Robin Hood’s lady love. In the story, she falls in love with a young Bank clerk who tries to prevent an evil merchant trader from stealing her inheritance. Finally in this version, the Bank is the bad guy. Although they never marry, Marian spends the remainder of the story mourning his loss and going around London as a Gothic madwoman, making the fat cats at the Bank as uncomfortable as possible.
Penny dreadfuls targeted working-class boys, but wouldn’t you know it – girls liked to read them, too.
(Side note: The first time I ever saw my name in print was under a joke I submitted in the back of Boys’ Life which I read regularly because my brothers had a subscription. A boy in my fifth-grade class was horrified when he read it in his copy. The joke was: How much did it cost the pirate to get his ears pierced? A buccaneer! Yeah, I got $2 for that one.)
Anyway. Sometimes groups of factory girls would pool their money together to buy and share an issue. They had to pool their funds because life for poor or working-class women in Victorian England wasn’t much better than life for Georgian-era women, unfortunately.
Female factory workers were preferred to male workers because it was easier to talk them into working until they burned out than it was for men. Even so, they made two times less than their male colleagues. And that was an unbelievably small amount of money – in 1906, women doing needlework earned a penny an hour.
But the cool thing about penny dreadfuls, which one of my sources called “the video games of the Victorian era”, is that they helped boost literacy. They were so sensationalist and so popular that young people were motivated to learn to read to find out what happened next.
This, alongside other social changes, meant that by the mid- and late-Victorian era, literacy had spread among the working class. Girls who previously wouldn’t have been able to find a job outside of workhouses or factories – girls like Sarah Whitehead – could now find positions as salesgirls, servants in better households, cashiers, typists, and secretaries. They were no longer completely reliant on their male relatives for their security, and doomed to the streets if that fell through. The long, slow fight for women’s rights picked up steam.
Today, the Bank Nun stalks the streets of London, finally free to do what she wants. And what she wants to do is to keep making the moneyed people who forced her into penury feel uncomfortable. I’m just glad she finally has a home.
[MUSIC]
Steph: It’s time for lights out at the Paranormal Pajama Party. Thanks for joining me for season two! I can’t wait to share more creepy stories with you and get even angrier at patriarchal systems. Whee!
To learn more about the Bank Nun, penny dreadfuls, and why we’re superstitious about walking under ladders (hint: it’s about marriage), check out my sources in the show notes.
Follow @ParanormalPJParty on Instagram to see visuals from today’s episode.
I’ll be back next week with more spine-tingling tales and critical discussion. In the meantime, don’t forget: Ghosts have stories. Women have voices. Dare to listen.

Unmarried in Regency England

Sarah’s tragic tale is marked by grief, desperation, and the societal constraints of Regency-era England.

Life for working-class and middle-class women at the time was nothing like “Bridgerton” would have you believe. Women were often relegated to roles as caretakers, expected to manage household duties and care for family members, particularly male relatives. Their education was limited, focusing on “female skills” such as humanities, music, and art, designed to make them suitable companions for their future husbands.

Marriage was considered the ultimate goal for women, providing them with financial security and social standing. However, unmarried women faced societal stigma and were often viewed as unnatural, and a burden on their families.

They had limited control over their finances and depended on their male relatives for support. The welfare system at the time offered little assistance to single women, leaving them vulnerable to poverty – it even happened to Jane Austen.

Sarah and women like her found themselves without the support of a male relative, forced to navigate a society that offered little to no opportunities for independence or self-sufficiency.

Penny dreadfuls

After her death, James Malcolm Rymer, an early writer of penny dreadfuls, came across Sarah’s haunting tale and, likely inspired by his own life story, adapted the tale of Sarah and her brother into the serialised (and sensationalised) story, “The Lady in Black, or, the Widow and the Wife.”

Rymer’s version of Sarah’s story, published as a penny dreadful, introduced a new narrative that portrayed Sarah as a Gothic madwoman named Marian who becomes a central figure in a thrilling tale of love, betrayal, and revenge. It helped perpetuate Sarah’s story, transforming her into a legendary figure.

Penny dreadfuls, including “The Lady in Black, or, the Widow and the Wife,” played a surprising role in boosting literacy rates among the working class. Although marketed to boys, their engaging and addictive nature motivated young Victorian women to learn to read.

By providing affordable and entertaining reading material, penny dreadfuls played a crucial role in breaking down barriers to literacy and education, empowering working-class women of the next generation with a few more opportunities for independence than Sarah Whitehead ever had.